This invention relates to computer application software and more specifically to document commenting software.
Lawyers, bankers, accountants, agents, brokers, programmers, and others spend much of their time preparing comments to various documents. A lawyer representing a commercial tenant, for example, might receive a commercial lease agreement from the landlord, prepare comments to the lease provisions, communicate those comments to the landlord, and ask that the lease be modified to conform to those comments. These documents typically include the same or similar provisions, so the comments to these provisions are generally the same or similar as well. A commercial lease, for example, typically includes similar provisions governing the term, computation and payment of rent, security deposits, prohibited uses, subleasing, repairs, alterations, property taxes, insurance, utilities, signs, landlord entry, parking, tenant damage, default, condemnation, subordination, notices, brokers, and notices. As a result, a lawyer is likely to encounter the same or similar provisions, and prepare the same or similar comments, each and every time he or she represents a tenant in connection with a commercial lease negotiation.
Preparing the same or similar comments to the same or similar provisions is inefficient, costly, time consuming, tedious, and unenjoyable. In addition, due to the quantity of different comments to complex documents, many comments are often overlooked. Finally, members of the same company often make different comments to the same documents, so the company takes conflicting positions on the same issues, resulting in confusion both in the marketplace and within the company and signaling to those outside the company that the company is not well organized and its members not well coordinated.
Existing commercial programs have only relatively rudimentary commenting features—allowing a user to insert new comments manually into an existing document. Some examples of existing applications include Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional from Adobe Systems Incorporated (San Jose, Calif., USA), Microsoft Word 2003 and Excel 2003 from Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, Calif., USA), and WordPerfect 10 from Corel Corporation (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) which allow a user to insert comments manually into a document, file, or other. Further, some programs also allow multiple collaborators to insert comments into the same document in such a way that comments made by one person are distinguishable from comments made by another person, and also the identity of a person making a particular comment may be made known to others.
Despite the success of these applications, there is a need for improved commenting software. The prior art does not provide features such as automatically generating comments to documents prepared by other parties based on comments prepared by others and stored on a remote database or comments prepared by the user and others sharing a local database and stored on that database. There is a need for such an invention.